Hydra-powered Captain America gloats
over his plans coming to fruition: unable to face the Red Skull with
his telepathic powers he got the Avengers Unity Squad to take the
Skull down for him, also surgically removing Charles Xavier's brain
from the villain. Cap then arranged for the Skull to escape and
return to his estate—finding Cap waiting for him....
Germany 1945: Cap catches up to the Red
Skull and challenges him to battle. The Skull summons his troops,
rappelling from the ceiling and the fight is on. Cap quickly tears
through the solders and faces the Skull; the villain reveals that he
can murder Helmut Zemo in an Allied prison cell if Cap does not knell
before him in submission to him as the new leader of Hydra....
Now, in the aftermath of the civil war
in Sokovia, the Red Skull sends a message to SHIELD that he wants the
United Nations to recognize his new government and lift the sanctions
against Sokovia or he will respond with a nuclear attack on a major
European city. When Sharon Carter brings the news to the World
Security Council, they decline to make a decision without the input of
SHIELD Director Steve Rogers. But Sharon, despite this rebuff, orders
a Helicarrier into the war zone....
Now facing Cap, the Red Skull demands
to know how he could have let the Avengers capture him. Cap responds
that he serves Hydra and the Skull is not Hydra, only an usurper.
Though the villain says (rightly) that he made Cap everything he is
today, Cap savagely beats the Skull and hurls him out of a window to
his apparent death. We now learn that the Skull was killed with the
approval of his daughter Sin and Crossbones. Cap then welcomes Madame
Hydra and the new High Council of Hydra....
1945: Elisa Sinclair (later to become
Madame Hydra) meets Cap to tell him that while Hydra has been broken,
subsumed by the Nazis, and that the Allies are working on a dangerous
superweapon: the Cosmic Cube....